Luckily for Hacker, its plight was spotted by wildlife photographer Audun Rikardsen, who was out in his boat searching for new picture opportunities during the polar winter in the Kaldfjorden, a whale-rich fjord near Tromsø in northern Norway.

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Rikardsen alerted the local coastguard, then returned that same night with a friend in a bid to find and free the whale. After an hour or so, they spotted it, but it seemed scared and stayed away. “Gradually, the whale started to understand we were there with good intentions,” says Rikardsen. “We were sure it was tangled in fishing gear, and struggled for about 4 or 5 hours to free it, but we couldn’t cut through the cord,” he says. “It came right alongside our tiny boat, all 30 tonnes of it, and could easily have tipped us over, but instead, it was asking for help.”

The coastguard crew, pictured here, arrived in the early hours. They eventually had to give up, but the whale luckily survived the night. In the morning, they summoned a diver from the fire and rescue team, who went down and investigated. The cord was wrapped round the whale’s head, disappearing into its mouth at the bottom of the picture, before reappearing on the other side, winding round a fin and tangling up the tail. Eventually, after some difficulty, the whale was freed.

Only then did the rescuers realise that the cord was a subsea internet cable that should have been 170 metres down on the bed of the fjord.

But for Rikardsen, there was a price to pay. His village, Skulsfjord, had no network or cellphone coverage for more than a fortnight until the cable was replaced.

This article appeared in print under the headline “Major fault on the line”